@bender@twtxt.net Sorry, trust was the wrong word. Trust as in, you do not have to check with anything or anyone that the hash is valid. You can verify the hash is valid by recomputing the hash from the content of what it points to, etc.

@prologic@twtxt.net do the existing major clients today perform that verification, or is it simply “hey, there is that thingy let’s use it for reference!”?

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, they do 🤣 Implicitly, or threading would never work at all 😅 Nor lookups 🤣 They are used as keys. Think of them like a primary key in a database or index. I totally get where you’re coming from, but there are trade-offs with using Message/Thread Ids as opposed to Content Addressing (like we do) and I believe we would just encounter other problems by doing so.

My money is on extending the Twt Subject extension to support more (optional) advanced “subjects”; i.e: indicating you edited a Twt you already published in your feed as @falsifian@www.falsifian.org indicated 👌

Then we have a secondary (bure much rarer) problem of the “identity” of a feed in the first place. Using the URL you fetch the feed from as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ’s client tt seems to do or using the # url = metadata field as every other client does (according to the spec) is problematic when you decide to change where you host your feed. In fact the spec says:

Users are advised to not change the first one of their urls. If they move their feed to a new URL, they should add this new URL as a new url field.

See Choosing the Feed URL – This is one of our longest debates and challenges, and I think (_I suspect along with @xuu@txt.sour.is _) that the right way to solve this is to use public/private key(s) where you actually have a public key fingerprint as your feed’s unique identity that never changes.